Dear Feel-Good-Health-Challengers, hope you’re feeling great and firing on all cylinders today!

Today’s TIP is about food quality and shopping smart. You may have heard some people tout the nutritional superiority of organic foods (or even better, biodynamic), and I would definitely agree that they are incomparable in nutritional value, regardless of whether people say they can’t taste the difference. The reason for this, you ask? When you buy produce, it’s often already at least a week old, plus the soil it came from is nutrient deficient and depleted. Nowadays, commercially farmed soil is especially deficient in most minerals. Typical chemical fertilizers are made up of primarily 3 nutrients: N, P, K, (Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium), but where are the rest of the 52 minerals needed for optimum soil health? Nowhere to be found, in most cases! So it doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to understand that if our soils are deficient, then the food we eat is deficient, making our bodies deficient.

However, there are some simple steps we can take. Like buying the right things organic (those that matter most) and also buying locally, which usually means much more freshness. Also, it’s very important to be aware of which fruits and vegetables are highest in pesticides. The EWG puts out an annual list of Pesticides in Produce. You can also print the shorter one-page PDF version (for yourself and everyone you love), and stick it on your fridge for quick reference. It contains the famous Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen. If you made the effort to buy the organic counterparts of at least the top 10-15 worst items on that list, you will be doing a great service to your health – especially in the long term – and it’ll only set you back a few extra dollars for the week. If you find it expensive, I suggest you seriously consider paying a premium for quality food now, rather than a lot more in medical expenses later on. Invest in your body, your temple! We all know we spend a ton of money of far less important things.

I think our nearby Runaway Creek Farm puts it best, on their website:

GOOD… Buying foods from organic growers who are passionate about sustainable, healthy food and the future of our planet.

BETTER… Buying foods from organic growers who are local. Support your community and consume less energy from the farm to your table.

BEST… Buying your food from a local organic grower whom you know! Visit our farms and discover our passion for creating your food.

In terms of meats, it is always preferable to choose pasture-raised or grass-fed animals, which is the intended food and environment that all these wonderful creatures were designed for and need in order to thrive. You cannot get health from eating sick animals! The conventional grain-fed animals found everywhere have been literally tortured and fattened up as quickly as possible on a GMO corn-based diet, closely resembling the SAD. It’s no wonder people and animals are both getting sicker together! This type of feed is so unnatural and inappropriate to a cow’s digestive system that it makes their internal organs nearly fail by the time of slaughter. In fact, they are often kept alive with the antibiotic supplements in their diet. I strongly suggest you watch the powerful and shocking (Academy Award nominee) documentary Food, Inc. for more info. Given this, don’t expect to find much of the beneficial Omega-3 fats normally found in their meat; what we get rather is much higher Omega-6 content, which we are already over-consuming as a population.

Same goes for fish, opt for wild caught whenever possible. Farmed fish is fed the cheapest soy and colorants to give them the precise weight and look that sells. Wild salmon is very high in healthy Omega-3 fats because it eats lots of krill, whereas caged farmed salmon has never even seen krill in its entire life! This means that we’re talking about entirely different animals, in reality. A final example is real raw honey (that contains actual bee pollen as well as over a hundred different compounds!), which has almost nothing in common with the sugar-filled bear honey container you may see in grocery stores. Just some food for thought… pun intended!

Let’s make some wise choices where it counts the most and whenever possible. If you’d like to join me and help bring down the price of quality food (which we’re entitled to!), let’s all be mindful consumers and vote with each dollar we spend! Demand inevitably lowers prices, over time. The longer we continue to consume (and thus demand) garbage quality, on and on it will continue to go.

The health of the people is dependent upon the quality of the food they consume. And the quality of their foods depends on the quality of the soil on which that food is grown.
-Jerome I. Rodale (founder of Rodale Press and known for his Prevention Magazine)

Man seeks to change the foods available in nature to suit his tastes, thereby putting an end to the very essence of life contained in them.
-Sathya Sai Baba (Indian guru)

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
-George Orwell (English novelist and journalist)

Hi everybody, hope your day went as you imagined it!

Mine was good, and I got my exercise from swinging the garden mattock (a.k.a. γκασμάς) hundreds of times, before planting our large vegetable garden.

Onto today’s TIP: I’m sure we’ve all heard that weight loss is 80% nutrition and 20% exercise. I believe this to be true, and it certainly has been in my experience. So how do we ensure the largest and most important step is taken care of? Simple, JERF (Just Eat Real Food)!!

Eating real food means choosing to put into your mouth (which is not a garbage disposal!) mostly things that are as close as possible to their natural form. Ideally, it should be a single ingredient (not a long list of things you can’t pronounce!). Unprocessed, unrefined, just pure fresh goodness. At every meal (and even snack), you fill at least half your plate with vegetables (a mix of colors + some raw is best), then have a good chunk of protein like meat, fish, fowl or eggs, and and add flavor with herbs and spices. Make sure to also consume healthy fats (e.g. animal fats, real butter and coconut oil for cooking, raw olive oil + olives, avocados, raw nuts). A few fruits (berries are best) and some sensible indulgences (dark chocolate and red wine) are good too. For drinking, it’s seriously best to stick to water and some tea or black coffee (all other sweetened beverages are full of high-fructose corn syrup – yuck!). Doing just this will drastically change your body composition – you’ll be well on your way to success. This advice is particularly important in a time when we’re overfed and undernourished!

If a food comes in a box, can or wrapper – think twice before eating it, because it is often just disguising as one of the many forms of sugar, which is found in E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G, even most seemingly “healthy” foods (bread, milk, flavored yogurts, designer coffees, smoothies, energy/granola bars, pretzels, sports drinks and vitamin water, energy drinks, dried fruit, all soda, juices and fruit drinks, sweetened teas, alcohol, sauces, dressings and vinaigrettes, pudding, frozen breakfast foods, muffins, any cereal, instant oatmeal, etc. – beware of anything fat-free!). I’m not even exaggerating. It may be time to purge all the SAD foods in your home that are not good for you or your family.

Good luck and keep doing your best!

The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook
–Julia Child (American chef, author, and television personality)

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.
–Anthelme Brillat Savarin (French lawyer and politician, gained fame as an epicure and gastronome)

Sugar is a type of bodily fuel, yes, but your body runs about as well on it as a car would.
–V.L. Allineare

Hey guys, I hope everyone is doing well and feeling good, or better than before. If this day or week wasn’t the best or not quite up to your hopes and expectations, don’t despair! Tomorrow is another opportunity to shine and improve. One day at a time.

On this note, I just wanted to chime in at the end of the day to give this quick but important TIP:

When you wake up in the morning, take a couple of minutes to just breathe, be grateful for your health and all the good in your life (there is so much!) and then consciously visualize the day ahead.

Hello everyone and welcome to Day 6, it’s nice to have you join us you again! 🙂

Helen, I totally agree that everyone has to find their own path and make their own choices. More often than not, we don’t always choose the optimal path from the get-go, but we inevitably learn some lessons which lead us closer to our own personal truth. I think there is a fundamental human need to make mistakes, it’s part of the learning process. The trick is to actually take the time to reflect on them and deduce the lesson – never give up, keep on trying! So it’s OK for anyone not to be perfect at this very instant, but if you’re better than you were yesterday, acknowledge and even applaud yourself for it – it’s a sure sign that you’re on the right track. Don’t be afraid to try and to fail. Progress is what matters. There is really no rush to be a certain weight right now. It’s not realistic – or healthy – to try undo a lifetime’s worth of suboptimal choices in a very short period of time!

I don’t think any one approach to health or weight management can apply to every human being. We all have a unique biochemical individuality that can make our personal “ideal” nutrition to be different than the next person’s. Just where our direct ancestors come from could have a big impact on food tolerances and sensitivities! That being said, the human body and its metabolism have evolved on Earth over the last nearly 3 million years, and so I believe the best nutritional framework we have must be based on the study of evolutionary biology. If we plotted all of human history onto a 24 hour clock, the development of agriculture and grain-based diets (around 10,000 years ago) represents only the last 12 seconds!! This is a major reason I think wheat in particular has such insidious effects on our health, in the long-term. Let alone the fact that practically all wheat on the planet is now genetically modified. A good place to learn about this specifically is the book Wheat Belly, by renowned cardiologist Dr. William Davis.

Now, although an evolutionarily novel food does not automatically imply that it’s problematic, if we just look around us, there is abundant proof that we’ve got it seriously wrong!

The current low-fat doctrine – and by extension high-carb/sugar – has so messed with our neuro-regulation of appetite and caused major changes in our gut biome that our bodies are getting progressively more damaged, at an alarming rate. This also results in us being completely out of touch with the distress signals our bodies may be giving us. It’s no wonder that the risk of cancer has gone from 1 in 30 in 1900 to 1 in 2 (and getting worse) as of the year 2000!! This means that at least half of us are going to die of cancer, according to solid statistics. If that doesn’t scare the pants off you enough to initiate change, I don’t know what will.

We have a frightening percentage of metabolically damaged and obese people than has ever before existed anytime in the history of the world. One look at our current Western world and the USDA’s food pyramid/food plate makes it obvious that the Standard American Diet (SAD) is not working! As a population, we are sicker than ever before, and the reason for this has political underpinnings as well (inevitably).

Based on this, I firmly believe that it makes sense to eat something resembling our ancestral diet, which is likely most appropriate for our genetics (mutations and adaptations take millennia!). In any case, I think we can all agree that it is absurd to just accept and blindly trust what any government tells us about what is best for us.

So, in order to end this somewhere, my TIP is for everyone to continue to educate yourselves on what health and optimal nutrition really is. And expect it to change over time – we must keep an open mind! There is so much we don’t know yet, it’s scary. Mankind’s knowledge of nutrition is still in its infancy. The trap is to never think our “modern science” knows best and has finally outsmarted nature. It’s up to each and every one of us to keep learning and do the best we know how, right now.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
–Arthur Schopenhauer (Gernan philosopher)

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
–Albert Einstein

P.S. Nick, I will definitely watch the video you sent and an upcoming tip will be about the potential benefits of intermittent fasting.

Hey everyone, hope you’re feeling good today! After all, that’s the point of the challenge, is it not?

First off, Nick, make no mistake about it, I am not trying to motivate anyone here, simply sharing some tips and tricks that can be helpful. Helen is and always will remain the mother of motivation! She always starts these good initiatives and then boosts everyone through them. Thank you, Helen, on everyone’s behalf! And a big shout out to Nick for the positive changes he’s making!!

Speaking of everyone, where the heck are the others? It seems neither motivation nor health tips are enough to induce active participation! I’m not sure if everyone uses email daily, perhaps we need to text them a link or something… I’ll look into it.

Without further adieu, and inspired by Jackie’s excellent (and supremely important) article, sent earlier today, here’s your Day 5 TIP™ (not an actual trademark)! 😛

How many people can you think of that are truly healthy? Health may mean different things to each one of us, but I’d be willing to bet that anyone who makes your list is not dieting. Probably never does, in fact.

I sincerely believe that dieting is unhealthy and doesn’t work! There is an immense body of research proving this to be a fact, and the outdated and overly simplistic calories in/calories out model is a flawed myth which is being disproven more and more by the scientific community.

Sadly, the worst part about all this stuff is what’s it’s done to our self-talk, self-esteem, body image and how it has affected society overall. It has particularly insidious and devastating effects on children, especially young girls.

Jackie & I watched the CBC documentary Helen recommended the other day, Sext Up Kids, and they put it best: “A young girl is either fuckable, or invisible.” This starts off from a very young age with the seemingly innocuous obsession with the “perfect” Disney princesses – and then it goes all the way to the ubiquity of free online porn, which shapes the image of what kind of woman boys desire and demand. Can you imagine the deep damage this does to the very fabric of our society? No kidding our parents and grandparents say things (about our current society) like “έχουμε ξεφύγει εντελÏŽς”. What our the morals and values we live by – and pass on to our kids, consciously or not?

I may have gone a bit far down the rabbit hole, but this is really important. I propose that we start by embracing and loving ourselves as we are right now, then ditch dieting and weight loss. Real health (and sustained weight loss, ironically) can only come from a focus on gradual and sustainable, not drastic, changes. By being more active and practising true guilt-free moderation, we become not only healthier, but better people and role models to our children and society at large.

PLEASE consider these ideas, they are of paramount importance in our challenging times. I would be happy to share more about how to effect change and live healthier, if this interest people. Start by feeling good about yourself today!

In summary, my TIP is to forget about fad dieting and start living healthier, little by little, right now!

Sorry about the length… love and blessings to everyone.